Okay, bear with me for a bit. I’m going to pull some crazy literary theory shit.
There’s this one famous footnote that Freud added to one of his books, Interpretation of Dreams, years after it was originally published. The gist of the footnote is this: “Hey, everybody, quit assuming that EVERYTHING in dreams is a symbol for something!” Freud thought that dreams had two layers of meaning: the obvious meaning (what was going on in the dream, on the surface) and the ‘latent’ meaning, which is all the stuff that is symbolized on the dream—the meaning under-the-surface that we always think about when someone says ‘Freud’. Freud said we should, basically, quit getting so overly-Freudian on our dreams. He said that we should try to find the ‘dream-work,’ or the combined meaning of the surface and latent elements of the dream. Instead of just saying, “oh, this obviously symbolizes this,” we should say, “when we take all the surface elements into consideration alongside the symbols, what does the whole of this dream actually mean?” I like to think of it in terms of vector math:
So, dreamwork is what you get when you add the rest of the stuff together equally. It’s what the dream is pointing at.
Now, the only people in the universe who still take Freud pretty seriously are literary theorists, and they don’t even take all of him seriously. I have an awesome professor right now who studies comics, and he uses dream-work to understand comics and graphic novels: “When we combine the effects produced by both the surface and the symbolic aspects, what’s the work of this comic? What is it actually pointing at?” It works very well because comics are filled with icons and symbols, and are very fertile grounds for both latent and obvious meaning.
I like to think about games this way, too. When you combine all the stuff that is in a game—the obvious stuff, like the art and the script and the mechanics, and then all the ‘latent’ stuff, like “how does this control scheme influence the way I think about the game?” or “what’s special about the actions the game makes me perform?” or “what does this game assume about its audience?” or “how did the game’s creators establish its tone and mood?” and so on, it helps you to get a more complete and holistic idea of what’s actually going on in the game you’re playing—what’s special about it, and what it’s doing to your brain. And because games are a bit like dreams, the comparison works.
Anyway: have you ever had a moment where you feel particularly conscious of a game’s latent content? The moment I would cite is probably when, while playing Don’t Look Back for the first time, I suddenly became hyperconscious of the way I normally play platformers, and realized what DLB was doing to force me to change that. The nuke moment in Modern Warfare was also pretty effective in this way. It made me suddenly conscious of what kind of agency I expect to have in a FPS, and, in taking that agency away, attempted to express its political message on a kind of subconscious level. What else could have made me want to shoot those renegade Russians so badly? They’d killed me, Anakin-Skywalker-style, once already!
And what about the gamework—have you ever tried to explain the essential essence of a game to a friend, only to get caught up stumbling over words because games are actions, not words, and it’s hard to heal that breach? I feel like the writers who are best able to talk about a game’s work are the ones who write artistically– who try to articulate gamework through the language of metaphor. Tim Rogers’ recent God Hand article does this brilliantly: the final paragraph is so clever that I cannot read it without being ashamed of myself. There are some NGJ pieces out there that I think really make a serious grab at expressing gamework, too—Quinns’ piece on Wurm Online was scary as hell. It made me feel that through this game I could suddenly understand the essential wickedness of man or some shit, even though I hadn’t even played it yet and don’t believe in the essential wickedness of man.
I wish that I’d have been able to articulate this concept back when I’d been studying games for school. It would have solved so many pointless arguments about what the ‘most important part’ of a game is, or ‘what makes game X different form game Y,’ or ‘what is the point of game genre X’—those are all ultimately very rocky ways to think about games. I feel like we should be encouraging each other to look at what games are pointing at, too. Games are like prefab dreams—which is simultaneously awesome and pretty spooky.
kentsutherland
lauramichet
guestwriter
Switchbreak
/ May 20, 2010First off, Freudian vector math = awesome.
The best example I can think of where I suddenly became conscious of the latent elements of a game was under the museum in Silent Hiill 2. The section starts with you descending a long staircase, so long that it takes several minutes to walk down the whole length of it. When you get to the bottom you find some normal rooms, and then a hole that you can jump down. On the next floor down, you find an old elevator that carries you even further down. Throughout that entire act of the game, every door you find to take you out of an area carries you further down, until it starts to seem ridiculous how deep into the earth you must be. The game never points it out, but over time it builds into this very distinct feeling of unreality, and adds to the constant feeling within the game that the world itself is a sentient place that is consciously leading you somewhere that you aren’t yet aware of. It was some brilliant and subtle design work on the part of the developers.
lauramichet
/ May 20, 2010Silent Hill games ARE totally ripe to be analyzed as dreams. Someone should get on that! It would be among the most badass things ever. I have a feeling that horror games– good ones, anyway– are among the best to analyze like this. Or games with horrific things in them.
What’s really creepy to me about this games-as-dreams thing is that when we play a game, we’re essentially all having the same dream– we’re all exiting the world into this weird nebulous place where we use new ways of thinking. Everyone interprets a Silent Hill game individually, but we’re all reacting to the same hallucinatory stimuli. And when we allow ourselves to get immersed in a game, we’re collaborating with those stimuli to create our own private hallucination– one where the game becomes real to us, and we have real physiological reactions to it, like increased heartbeat, signs of fear or excitement, etc. We’re willingly tricking ourselves into these things.
It would be interesting to explore this idea with relation to that new Silent Hill game which apparently was going to ‘psychologically profile’ the players. Was it actually effective in that way? Did anyone here feel like it was really getting to them on a nightmare-like level?
Switchbreak
/ May 20, 2010To be honest, I haven’t played the new Silent Hill game, but I blanched when I heard about the “psychological test” that it gives you in order to adapt the game to each player. My thinking is, kinda paradoxically, that this can’t help but make everything in the game more generalized.
The approach of previous games in the series had been to take very universal themes like sex and death, and use those as hooks to pull the player in to a very specific, very personal, and very psychologically affecting place. The whole “psychologically profile and adapt” idea sounds to me more like an emotional carpet bomb. Instead of bringing you to where they are, they are going out to find you, but using tools that can at best only give them a very loose idea. They may still be able to hit a few of your triggers, but only through blunt trauma.
veret
/ May 20, 2010I’m going to get more pretentious than usual here, so bear with me.
I’m not sure the dichotomy of obvious/latent categories is quite complex enough to contain all of the symbolism in games. Symbolism itself can be obvious too, such as (to use a cliched example) the hyper-macho soldier type who’s always sucking on a cigar. GEDDIT? IT’S CAUSE HE’S TOTALLY GAY, RIGHT? Then there’s the stuff that’s slightly less obvious but still pretty literal, e.g. the excellent Silent Hill descent-into-Hell example that Switchbreak just brought up. Up another level, and you see developers using the strengths of the videogame medium to manipulate their players into creating symbolism. I recall KoTOR 2 and Bioshock both did something pretty cool with this: On the surface it’s just an entertaining plot twist, but taken in a meta-game context it’s a fascinating demonstration of what free will is and is not in the game. If you don’t know the examples I’m talking about, would you kindly go play through Bioshock now?
Beyond that, we start getting into some very murky waters of intent. I’ll bring up CoD4 since you’ve apparently played it: Remember that level where you play as the gunner on an AC-130 plane, picking off tiny specks of people on the ground below? When the game first came out, I recall everybody had a different opinion of that level; some thought it was all good fun, other people read it as an anti-war protest and a commentary on the dehumanization of modern warfare. For all I know, Infinity Ward intended it to be both. In fact, for all of the examples I’ve brought up, we can split them into two levels based on intent: In one the developer is deliberately inserting symbolism into their game, in the other they just borrowed the archetype of (for example) the cigar-chomping soldier. The latter case even has its own extra layer of symbolism, because it’s a reflection of the day’s cultural norms and our own tendency to mindlessly echo certain themes without consideration of their context.
Okay, yeah, that was even more pretentious than I was expecting, but you get the picture. I like to see symbolism as a continuous spectrum of depth, and a master auteur can use the full range to appeal to various audiences. Which is my extremely roundabout way of bringing up Braid. There’s a work that encompasses everything from nostalgic goomba-stomping to (ambiguously) deep reflections on love and the passage of time, all packaged in a brilliantly Portalesque mind-bender of a game.
In other news, I heartily approve of both images in this article.
Harbour Master
/ May 20, 2010It’s okay, this level of pretentiousness is comfortable. A little more, then its a slap on the wrist for you.
The only problem with the Bioshock moment you refer to is that it is *so* clever that the rest of the game is is diminished. It does not follow up on its grand meta-game statement and thus evolves into a gaming contradiction.
Morgon
/ May 21, 2010You’re going to have to explain “gaming contradiction”, because that statement doesn’t make any sense at all.
Harbour Master
/ May 21, 2010Morgon – I can’t seem to reply beneath you. I type far too many words here so I’ve been trying to diet, trim down the words. Seems my comment was little too brief. Don’t want to spoil the poor thing to pieces, but.
Bioshock says something about what gaming *is*, the powerlessness of a player, as veret alludes to. And you’d half expect the game to have listened to itself, and take that moment to break out of the genre convention somehow – but it doesn’t. If the game had stopped at that point, then we would be talking about how superb an ending it was. How clever.
But no, it carries on as if nothing has happened, as if that statement about gaming meant nothing. Business as usual, kids. Thus it feels like the thing is a contradiction; the latter part of the game does not sit well with that bombastic revelation.
As Laura’s post discusses elements of a game that come together and make a “gamework” – it seemed to me that the gamework of Bioshock was self-inconsistent, contradictory. Maybe contradictory gamework would have been better. Or a game of contradictory work. Or a Freudian slip. Whatever.
veret
/ May 22, 2010@Harbour:
You’ve summed up my point about Bioshock much more clearly than I could manage, so thank you for that. Amusingly enough, the player suddenly does have a choice after the big Moment ‘O Revelation in that game: They can stop playing. This is what I did, since I had already heard the final section wasn’t worth it, and I was rewarded with a much deeper ending and several extra hours of free time. Players who are devoted to taking revenge against Fontaine, or those who are just interested in completion, are instead forced to sit through a very disappointing final act. They are slaves, but a Man Chooses, does he not?
I’m mostly kidding here. I’d like to think that the developers intentionally chose to include a deeply latent meta-game with their product, but that would probably be giving them way too much credit. More likely they just started cutting corners in the home stretch, which lead to the frustrating contradiction you described.
Oh, and in case you hadn’t figured it out, wordpress has a limit on the number of nested replies you can do. I think they’re trying to prevent the indentation from getting out of hand.
Harbour Master
/ May 20, 2010Some interesting stuff here but I’d side with veret that it doesn’t feel as easy to dissect a game and sort its guts into a bucket for obvious guts and another one for not-so-obvious guts.
I mean on a basic level – one man’s obvious is another woman’s not so obvious, and that changes the vector somewhat. (I suppose you might take your thesis further and say a gamework is a personal thing and depends on your individual experience, but I don’t know if this is new language that helps us understand how games actually work)
However, I do completely agree with you that the composite whole is more important than the individual elements. Dead Space has a crummy/confusing story, but it has ideas and execution that raised it from B-movie game to fun (“strategic dismemberment” for example, completely thwarted your FPS aiming instincts). No One Lives Forever is fairly straightforward shooter with some funny setpieces but it has such pervading charm that it is impossible not to love.
Which one is Freud? The one of the left looks like he/she is wearing a disguise.
(Also, Lewis D would applaud you for coming up with an alternative term to replace gameplay. http://lewisdenby.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/gameplay/)
lauramichet
/ May 20, 2010I probably should have used the word ‘surface’ instead of ‘obvious.’ Freud uses the term ‘manifest’. By this I mean that if someone has a dream about getting trampled by horses, the “manifest” or “obvious” or “surface” dream is: Dreamer got trampled by horses. Latent interpretations would be: “The horses represent penises!” or something like that. That’s what we argue about.
What I’m saying is: it shouldn’t be too much of an argument about what the manifest/surface/obvious part of the dream/game is. I think you both misunderstood my use of the word. Maybe the “obvious” means “whatever we simply don’t have to argue about because it’s right there in literal terms.”
Harbour Master
/ May 20, 2010Hmm, this definition of obvious is better, it’s more… obvious. I probably need to go away and think some more about this, but its already past midnight here. The things I do for this blog…
theprettiestboyontheplanet
/ May 20, 2010I read surface/obvious as you describe it, but I feel like this discussion could benefit from a clearer definition of the boundaries of “latent content”. HM and Veret seem to have interpreted it to mean “the symbolic content within a game”, but I personally felt it was more along the lines of “any element within a game that the player doesn’t really think about very much, but still has an effect upon her/his experience”.
For example, sound design largely qualifies as latent content to my mind. It’s not symbolic, necessarily, but it shapes the player’s experience whether s/he is aware of it or not.
veret
/ May 22, 2010@Laura:
I like the literal vs symbolic definition, as it seems the most clear-cut. “Stuff we don’t have to argue about” seems a little less accurate (see my cigar-munching example above; no debate there), but I get your point. Unless TPBotP is right, and I’m misinterpreting you again?
@TPBotP (let me know if you don’t like that abbreviation):
I’m not sure the unnoticed details in games really fit into the Freudian vector math we’re doing here, but that does sound like the subject of another, equally interesting discussion. Oh, and some of us actually do notice sound design; I’m thinking I might write about it myself as soon as I feel like uploading a million sound clips to my wordpress account.
theprettiestboyontheplanet
/ May 20, 2010By this logic, would games whose surface and latent content work against each other be nightmares? It seems to me that the having the two bits at odds almost always ends up being incredibly aggravating.
One example of this sort of twisted dream is Devil May Cry 3. Every single easily visible element of that game leads the player to assume, wrongly, that they should be able to blaze through the thing like a tornado made of leather jackets. When taken together, the responsive controls, the frenetic cutscenes, the blaring rock soundtrack, the giant swords and guns (and bladed electric guitars), and the relentless bravado of the protagonist all make the game’s habit of beating you to within an inch of your life for the smallest mistake enormously confusing and frustrating.
To have any hope of success, you are forced to ignore the surface sheen of the game entirely and search instead for latent bits which clue you in to how the game is actually meant to be played. Eventually, you notice that the ridiculous amounts of damage you take, the pinball-bumper sound effect that plays when you dodge, and the clockwork-reliable visual and audio cues of your enemies’ attacks all add up to a game of skillfully evading attacks, and not the carelessly mashy beat-em-up you were sold.
DMC3 was often criticized for being too difficult, but I’d argue that it’s this massive disconnect between its surface and latent bits that caused so many players to quit in disgust.
It’s true, Tim Rogers has a wonderful way of relating the holistic experience of the games he covers. My favorite thing he has ever written is undoubtedly his discussion of cursor sound effects tucked away at the end of his review for Inazuma Eleven. (http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=461) It takes a deft hand to encapsulate the character of an entire game within the description of a single sound.
Switchbreak
/ May 20, 2010Devil May Cry is a really interesting case study for looking at the interaction between the story, the game, the player character and the player.
Like you say, the story and setting (and I’ll include in that the music, the style, the way it’s animated, the wire-fu movies it references) all are meant to convey that you are a bad motherfucker to top all bad motherfuckers. As a new player, you will, like you say, feel like the game bait-and-switched you by giving you this papier-mache milquetoast after promising something awesome.
But I think there’s more to it than that, and it’s one of the reasons that DMC is one of my favorite games ever made. This is a game very specifically designed to reward finesse. There is not a single cheap hit in the game, or a single point of damage that you cannot avoid. Every enemy is meticulously designed with dozens of animation and sound cues that tell you, if you watch them, exactly what they’re going to do. Every time you die, the game is telling you: “look closer.”
And eventually you hit a turning point, where you find yourself keeping track of 50 guys at once, knowing exactly what’s coming at you from every direction a beat before it happens, where you’re jumping from air combo to air combo, juggling demons with your guns, unleashing your attacks at the exact right time when they leave an opening and never ever pressing a button that you didn’t intend to press. This is the sweet spot of game-player dialogue, where you are listening to every nuance of what the game is telling you, and in response you are making the game dance to your fingertips. This is where the swagger in the storyline pays off. DMC wants you to do the impossible, and it wants you to know that it’s impossible and that you’re doing it anyway. And it’s going to blare the cock-rock and give you a “taunt” button to celebrate it. The game succeeds not by making the character awesome, but by making him responsive enough to allow the player to be awesome through him. This isn’t where the sheen rubs off, this is where it starts to really sparkle.
That’s why the ending gives you a million demons to fight while the credits roll. Because finishing the story is no kind of reward for how far you’ve come. Finishing the story gives the character what he wants, and he’s not the star here. The player is the star, and the game is going to end with you kicking some ass one more time.
theprettiestboyontheplanet
/ May 21, 2010Oh I totally agree with everything you’ve said (DMC3 is one of my absolute favorites as well, by the way).
Like you say, DMC always, always lets you know what’s going to happen next as long as you are looking (and listening, the sound design in this game is incredible) hard enough. I like to think of it as a really awesome call-and-response song. The game first throws you a verse, a particular assortment of enemies and attacks, and then gives you a beat or two to craft your own response. If the player can’t come up with a rhyming refrain, an appropriate set of dodges and slashes, in time, the meter is broken and you die horribly. But once you learn to recognize the rhythm beneath the game’s song, the ridiculous wealth of responses available to you becomes clear, and you team up with the game to make beautiful music by turns.
It’s still not the game it says it is on the tin though. The player character is made of popsicle sticks and glass (which, like you say, is as it should be, and exactly why success is so thrilling), but the game tells you time and time again that he is invincible. The very first cutscene you see after hitting start shows your character getting stabbed about a thousand times and then casually eating a slice of pizza. This kind of surface content promises the player an experience that the underlying game mechanics simply don’t support. It’s a shame, because the experience it does offer is nothing short of magical.
DMC3 isn’t about being indestructible, it’s about being untouchable.
Harbour Master
/ May 21, 2010You guys make me want to play DMC3, but I’m not sure I’m up for the twitchfest learning curve it sounds like.
BeamSplashX
/ May 21, 2010It’s not so bad. I never really learned to play and slugged it out through normal but enjoyed the entire experience. Losing very rarely even bothered me. And of course, there’s no shame in playing on lower difficulties that are more accommodating. I think you might find the sheer mechanical polish and wealth of options the game offers will make it worthwhile. There’s really nothing else like it.
lauramichet
/ May 24, 2010Sorry I haven’t had a chance to respond to this earlier– I’e been writing papers about Robespierre and my brain is a soup.
I haven’t played DMC, but your writing about it, switchbreak, has inspired me to try and find a copy and a way to play it. It reminds me about that wolfire blog post from a year or so ago about how games that reward player actions and cleverness are more rewarding than games which bolster player confidence with increased stats– the argument is that you don’t learn anything by playing Diablo, but you DO learn from playing fighting gmaes or FPSes, even if what you’re learning is only muscle-twitch reflex skills– so long as the solution space isn’t absurd.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/09/character-stats-vs-player-skill/
so there is somehow a higher engagement with the game if the mechanics make it possible for you to win by sheer skill and wit. I’d argue that a few kinds of RPGs allow for certain kinds of skill/wit victories– like osme of the covnersational quests in Bioware games, for instance, which challenge the player to decode a situation and make a judgement call. But those can often have stupid solution spaces (oh no, doing the right thing led to your unexpected death!)
I’m not sure how I’d work this into a dreamwork-style analysis, though. I’d have to think about this.
BeamSplashX
/ May 25, 2010I actually had a sort of daydream moment where I suddenly understood how to play DMC3 (and thus all DMC games) properly, whereas a game like Phantasy Star Online only gets me thinking about which parts I can feasibly complete when I’m the proper level. Of course, there’s still a modicum of action skill involved in PSO, but it’s more of a trial-and-error process of knowing how to dodge a boss’ attacks ahead of time, so it doesn’t invite long-term thought about how to go about playing it like DMC does.
If that makes any sense.
Switchbreak
/ May 28, 2010Hmm, apparently there is science behind this idea:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37342086